14 ms·
All DuckDuckGo bang operators on one page
- frabert 6y agoI much prefer Firefox's "keyword" favourites. For example, I have a "cpp ..." search that automatically searched cppreference, another one "cmake ..." that searches CMake's documentation, and so on and so forth
- toyg 6y agoYeah those are basically the same (and came first), but you have to define and maintain them yourself.
- ufo 6y agoIs there some way to add a big list of search keywords to Firefox without having to type them one by one in the settings screen? I've been trying to figure out how to do this for years now with no luck.
- chrismorgan 6y ago1. Open the bookmarks view (probably Menu → Library → Bookmarks or Ctrl+Shift+B; not sure on macOS). 2. In the toolbar, within the Import & Backup menu button, use Backup… or Export Bookmarks to HTML…. 3. Observe the file format (JSON for one, HTML for the other) and replicate its effects for all the items you wish to add. 4. Restore or import your new bookmarks. I haven’t actually done this for over a decade. I suspect the backup/restore route might replace all bookmarks and the export/import route might just add new bookmarks, but I don’t know. What I’d really like is an extension that could manage all of these (sync with DuckDuckGo’s bangs, allow enabling and disabling individually, by group, &c., renaming bangs), but Mozilla have said “We have no plans to allow adding search engine dynamically via WebExtensions. We've had too many problems with hijacking.” (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1268401#c37 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1268401#c37.) So anything like this would need to be a program that could run locally and either mess with Firefox’s databases directly (places.sqlite, I think), or provide you with the relevant files for you to import manually. I’ve thought of making such a thing, but I’ve not done it yet. Part of the reason is lack of a good data source: for using DuckDuckGo bangs, you need a list that includes the destination of each bang, which I don’t think they provide in any principled way, so you’d be left just polling them.
- ufo 6y agoI hadn't thought about the search highjacking problem but it does help explain why Mozilla is intentionally making it harder to mess with the search engine settings. It does sound like an external program would be the only way to do it...
- leokennis 6y agoMain advantage of DDG bangs is they work everywhere, especially if you can set your default browser. In an on-location training on a laptop provided by the training company? Set search engine to DDG, type "!w election fraud" and you're on Wikipedia. So it's sort of the Firefox keyword feature, in the cloud, but with a little less control.
- MichaelMoser123 6y agoThe page lists all !bang search operators on one page, i think the feature is easier to use when you have all of them in one page; The page is kept in sync with all duckduckgo search operators by a nightly build process. The build script/motivation for the project is here https://github.com/MoserMichael/duckduckbang https://github.com/MoserMichael/duckduckbang (my previous submission got ShowHN in the title instead of Show HN, so submitting a second time)
- andrewzah 6y agoThis is really nice! I frequently use !w - wikipedia !drs - docs.rs !http - http status codes !a - amazon !yt - youtube !usps !fedex
- notRobot 6y agoAdding a few that I find handy: !so - stackoverflow.com !su - superuser.com !hn - HN :) !php - PHP manual !ss64 - ss64.com (CLI reference) !g - Google !i - DDG images !gi - Google images !imdb - IMDb !rt - Rotten Tomatoes
- ectoplasmaboiii 6y agoThe ones that I find myself using a lot !gm - google maps !sr/!sro - type in subreddit (add o for old reddit) !so - stack overflow (i usually use it with [tag])
- FabHK 6y ago> !gm - google maps !m will save you over 33% of typing... :-)
- ectoplasmaboiii 6y agoWell now I feel like an idiot. Thanks!
- FabHK 6y agoMaybe useful: for Amazon and Wikipedia at least (probably others), you can get country/language specific versions by appending the 2-letter ISO code: !wde - German wikipedia !wes - Spanish wikipedia !ade - search on amazon.de !auk - search on amazon.co.uk etc.
- Rompect 6y agoI use `!4_b` a lot
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- henil2911 6y agoWoah. I use bang all the time, but never knew there where this many bang's available!
- grimgrin 6y agoHeck yeah! Some ideas for ya: 1) We can ctrl-f to search obv, but add a filter up top that just fuzzies anything matching 2) Let me condense the header of a category, like how comments can hide their children in here 3) Both of the links in an entry go to the same thing, ala: `discworld` and `!discworld` can be clicked to do the same thing, populate the box up top, which _does_ let you click & press return. But it might be cool if one populated, and the other just took you to the !bang in ddg. Not in a new tab! The user can force it in a new tab if they want edit: I know #3 basically says "so just take the user to duckduckgo.com?q=!discworld which'll take 'em to whatever site that resolves to?" yeah pr much that, heh
- boomboomsubban 6y agoWith 1 and 2, isn't that basically how !bang is set up? You need to expand before you can collapse there I guess.
- MichaelMoser123 6y agothanks for the suggestions! (unfortunately I am not a big expert in frontend stuff, i usually copy stuff from stack overflow)
- grimgrin 6y agoshoot an email to jared@smell.flowers and i'll tell ya some thoughts in richer detail if it helps or is interesting to you :)
- pkamb 6y agoSo these all just directly search for that term on the (usually substandard) internal website search box? I don't get the appeal. I want the bang to show a good/filtered SERP, not load some other site directly. (similar to a `site:x` search on Google I guess.) What I'd really like to use is a search engine that had custom ranking of domains. I'd heavily weigh it to only show Stack Exchange, Reddit, and forum posts. Or a `!discussions` bang operator that filtered DDG results into that set.
- marcosdumay 6y agoWell, the appeal is that you can set your searchbox for DDG, and easily search all those others site when you want, no need to load search pages or change search providers. And it's appealing to me, so I do that. Most people won't agree, most people don't even mess with search providers, but it's doesn't harm them either.
- whelming_wave 6y agoI use `!rust` all the time when I just want to pull up the rust docs quickly, since their search is much more effective when I just want to know about the API for a File or something, though I don't get much more value out of them than that. And I've just learned I can use `!posix` to search the open group, which I'll probably use whenever I get upset with macOS's man pages again.
- scns 6y agothere is a nice plugin for rust https://rust.extension.sh/ https://rust.extension.sh/ not affiliated
- tshaddox 6y agoI've always been in the "I don't get it" boat with DDG bang operators. When I last tried switching it to my default search engine, I felt like any time I needed to search DDG for "!{bang} {query}" I could have just searched Google for "{query}" and gotten the result I was looking for. In many cases, Google will give even better results for siteX than siteX's own search, because Google is likely to correct for things like common spelling errors or word substitutions. Granted, I haven't given DDG an earnest try in a couple of years, so the DDG non-bang search results may have gotten better, but the fact that their bangs are still heavily touted as a killer feature doesn't give me much faith.
- varbhat 6y agoHow many bangs do you really remember ? Bangs are cool but i don't think one can remember many bangs. This site is also very good. But, it's unfortunately not much use to me as i would directly search the term with 'site:' during the time i would take to search for specific bang. Also, if i wanted to search specific site, i would add it in search engines of my browser.
- boomboomsubban 6y agoFor many sites, you can probably just guess the bang without much hassle. The easiest example is IMDb, but my success rate guessing is pretty high. Plus, most people tend to spend most of their time on just a few sites. Knowing one or two bangs is useful enough.
- ehsankia 6y agoI don't use this, but looking at that list, I would disagree. I just looked up some of the top sites I'd want to use and I wouldn't have guessed any of them Wikipedia -> !w Youtube -> !you reddit user -> !reu subreddit -> !reddits also !reddit points to new version, I'd want !redditold Twitter -> !tweet Steam -> !steme (???) Twitch -> !ttv That being said, if you're on DDG, there's pretty good auto complete on bangs so you can find it by typing the name and looking at the favicons.
- chrisparsons 6y agoThere are multiple aliases. For instance, I use !yt for YouTube (just checked and !youtube also works), and !twitch for Twitch. I'll agree with the parent in that it's very rare that I'm unable to guess the bang that I want.
- joshmanders 6y agoYup, throwing my hat into this ring of agreement. I used to have tons of special search engines in Chrome to do this, often aliased as name or something, and I switched to DDG and started using their Bang's just to realize that most of my custom search engines were obsolete and like 2-3 needed to be retrained in my head.
- DyslexicAtheist 6y agothose bangs are really a nice feature. my most often used bang in 2020 unfortunately still remains !g for every time I search something that is related to finding solutions for code / software engineering (or copy paste a problem line from syslog etc). ddg is in almost every case not showing me the most relevant result I want.
- test1235 6y agoI gave up on DDG after giving it a go for a year or so ... I don't know if Google prioritises Stack Overflow or what, but that's what I'm after, most of the time, and DDG just doesn't give me that.
- chris_f 6y agoTry Runnaroo. Stack Overflow search results are directly included on the SERP (in addition to organic web results) for programming queries. Plus the privacy aspect. Example for "python string match": https://www.runnaroo.com/search?term=python%20string%20match https://www.runnaroo.com/search?term=python%20string%20match I'm the creator of Runnaroo.
- dredmorbius 6y agoThis is interesting, but raises the metaquestion of when compiled listings or search are appropriate. DDG at this writing advertises 13,564 bangs: https://duckduckgo.com/bang?q= https://duckduckgo.com/bang?q= This page, as with the Show HN, groups bangs by category (Entertainment Multimedia News Online Services Research Shopping Tech Translation). There is a search feature (match on bang or URL) as well, with, of course, its own bang: !bang In my experience, it's possible to, very roughly, define bounds to search results and usefulness or approach: - 0 results is the null set. Obvious but worth noting. - 1 result is an identity. That is, a search returning precisely one entity identifies that entity. (This relationship may not be persistent over time). - To 10 results is a near universally useful set. SERPs, news sites, and many other interfaces focus on this scale. Ontologies typically branch to about 2-30 items. HN's front page lists 30 items. The Presidential Daily Brief runs about ten items. This apparently taxes the attention of some incumbents. - To 100 results remains tractable to the determined user. This means a capacity to identify specific item(s) of interest without necessarily resorting to recordkeeping. More detailed news sites might include as many articles. A print newspaper typically runs 100-250 individual stories per day. - To 1,000 results is methodologically tractable, though some recording and filtering system is all but certainly required. These need not be programmatic or algorithmic though often are. News wires (AP, AFP, Reuters, UPI) typically run 1,000--5,000 items/day. - To 1,000,000 results, jumping a few orders of magnitude, typically requires some technical searching or sorting capacity. Again, not necessarily algorithmic (a large print library collection of a million or more volumes can be managed through paper based systems, though seldom is now, and requires extensive structure of stacks, index, circulation, and reshelving). - To ~1 billion items is all but certainly programmatic. - Greater thaan a trilliion items enters the realm of probabalistic matches, relevance, and AI. I'm not aware of specific research in this area but would be quite interested in references. The classification would suggest bang search rather than comprehensive listing as being of interest to most peoople though. Sources: Seveeral of the values above are discussed here: https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/6c220n/media_attention_poverty_and_propaganda/ https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/6c220n/media_a... https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/7qya12/information_security_peps_podesta_who_are_you/ https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/7qya12/informa...
- djsumdog 6y agoI wonder how they choose what is worth of a bang and what's not. Are any of the bang operators paid placements?
- samhh 6y agoThat's one of my motivations for writing bangin. There are some sites I want to use bangs with which are either too niche or otherwise fall foul of DuckDuckGo's rules. https://github.com/samhh/bangin https://github.com/samhh/bangin
- svrb 6y agoWhat's the value of this over using !bang to search them directly on ddg?
- zzyzxd 6y agoThe only operator I use is "!", which is DDG's version of "I am feeling lucky". And I only use this because Google's silently phasing out the functionality[1]. 1. https://support.google.com/websearch/thread/15794018 https://support.google.com/websearch/thread/15794018
- jchook 6y agoI filed a support request with StartPage.com to offer the "I'm Feeling Lucky" functionality and never got a response. Maybe if more people ask...
- fsflover 6y agoForget about StartPage: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21371577 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21371577 Startpage is now owned by an advertising company (reddit.com) 182 points by rahuldottech 10 months ago | 82 comments
- glouwbug 6y agoGoddamn, thats fun! I didn't know this was a thing.
- smichel17 6y agoI use this frequently with stuff like mdn, where I know the exact page and which search terms will get me there, but it's not worth bookmarking (I have Firefox set to only autocomplete bookmarks, not history). For example, "justify-content mdn !"
- shrew 6y agoI've always been frustrated that the !mdn bang didn't have this behaviour by default. Looks like I can achieve the same result as you suggest with "! mdn justify-content" which should ease the change in muscle memory. Thank you!
- a_bonobo 6y agoI use !g often because google is a bit better at finding error messages, while DDG seems to search more for individual terms within the error message
- AlphaWeaver 6y agoFor ages I've wanted DuckDuckGo to add a "!copy" bang, which acts like the "!" operator (automatically navigates to the first search result) but instead of going to the page, it copies the link to my clipboard. There are plenty of projects I'm familiar with but don't know the canonical URL off the top of my head - when I link someone else to them I have to look up their homepage. This would make this process much faster.
- jchook 6y agoI built a simple node JS server to use as my default search engine. What you describe could be a 2-line change to my code. My motivation was using Google "I'm Feeling Lucky" without JS. The node app detects the "!lucky" bang, downloads the search results, finds the first link, and redirects to it. Let me know if it interests you.
- severine 6y agoIt would add to discoverability if a reminder of the bang appeared besides the search results (could be under a config setting), that way one could learn the bangs associated with their most used sites easily.
- MichaelMoser123 6y agoyou get a help text in a tooltip (hover text) with the URL of the search engine - when the mouse hovers over the link; I think that adding the url directly to the table entry might clutter up the page.
- severine 6y agoSorry, I was talking about DDG itself, not your site, which has great discoverability ;)
- cpeterso 6y agoThat's a good suggestion, though DDG has a financial incentive to keep users going through DDG's search page. OTOH, DDG created and supports bang shortcuts so they want people to use them. :) DDG could show a bang suggestion if any of the top search results are for sites that have bang shortcuts. Or suggest "Didn't find what you're looking for? Try !g" if the number of results found is small.
- amelius 6y agoDDG should show them at the bottom of their first search result page. That way, starting a new search with a bang operator wouldn't be such a hassle, e.g. on mobile, where it takes like 7 screen-taps to restart a search with e.g. "!g" appended to it. I might actually switch to DDG if they had that.
- franczesko 6y agoYou can add "!g" to your dictionary and initiate it with a quick swipe (e.g. I use "bang" to add it). Cool thing is, that you can add it anywhere in your query - DDG will pick it up
- amelius 6y agoCool, but I assume you still need to select the query and click it again to place the cursor, and possibly add a space, and then finally press enter (?)
- franczesko 6y agoYou don't need to replace the cursor and add space. "!g" can be placed anywhere in your query. To give you some examples: weather!g weather !g weather!g warsaw Each of those queries will work.
- sakjdlask 6y agoI did not know there is so many of them. They should advertise it much more as I think this feature could be quite attractive to a lot of people.
- K2h 6y ago!02faq = BMW 2002 FAQ first thing that caught my eye how can we have a such a specific car FAQ for vintage BMW and not have a corresponding bang for https://www.tdiclub.com/ https://www.tdiclub.com/ - the bible in diesel VW.
- vzqx 6y agoMost bangs are user submitted. Feel free to make one yourself: https://duckduckgo.com/newbang https://duckduckgo.com/newbang
- zmix 6y agoWoah! I. Did. Not. Know! Seriously, that's a lot!
- speek 6y agoI run https://duckduckgoog.com https://duckduckgoog.com (written https://twitter.com/mcrittenden https://twitter.com/mcrittenden) for those of you who want a default search engine of google but with the magic of !bangs
- gilrain 6y agoExcellent idea, but I worry that name is a trademark issue if you ever want to monetize.
- hirundo 6y ago!hackernews works.
- burmer 6y agoThese bangs have honestly changed the way I browse. With Ctrl+T, Ctrl+L, Ctrl+W, and tab-switching, the browser feels like vim in a small way. Without my mouse, I can open a new tab or switch to a new tab and immediately search Wikipedia, Amazon, IMDB, etc. All of this helps me not need Google if I know the best domain to look in, and it saves time.
- RMPR 6y ago> the browser feels like vim in a small way Use a real Vim emulation like tridactyl[0], life changer. 0: https://github.com/tridactyl/tridactyl https://github.com/tridactyl/tridactyl
- cobbzilla 6y agoOne of the simplest ones, DuckDuckGo Image Search, is on the list as `!ddgi` but it has a shorter version: just `!i`
- choward 6y agoThe one thing I don't like is that it goes through ddg. This makes sense implementation wise since it's a web site. But I wish it was built into the browser for when I use ddg in my browser URL field. Every once in a while ddg takes a while to respond.
- naniwaduni 6y agoIn Firefox you can set keywords for bookmarks so that you can get almost this effect.
- xattt 6y agoEdge does this too!
- perihelions 6y agoFirefox has a similar feature. You can define your own keyword rule, for example, to macro-expand hn duckduckgo into https://hn.algolia.com/?q=duckduckgo and thus get a shortcut to HN's own site search (Algolia), without involving Google/DDG/etc. To do this, you need simply to bookmark the URL https://hn.algolia.com/?q=%s and set the bookmark's "keyword" property to "hn". Then "hn" becomes a special operator in the omnibar, which eats the rest of the search string and substitutes it into its bookmark's "%s" parameter. (This isn't limited to search engine query strings: it's general-purpose template expansion on the URL string).
- RMPR 6y agoThis is neat, I hope it will also work with the Tridactyl's search bar
- bovine3dom 6y agoTridactyl can't use the bookmarks suggested above but you can do something similar with `:set searchurls.hn https://hn.algolia.com/?q=%s https://hn.algolia.com/?q=%s`.
- ddmma 6y agoInteresting how you’ll want break trillion company while oriental ai herd is fiercingly rising https://fortune.com/2020/09/27/google-antitrust-investigation-heres-what-you-need-to-know/ https://fortune.com/2020/09/27/google-antitrust-investigatio...
- evo_9 6y agoHow are these added to DDG? It’s surprising Discogs.com is not a bang operator. They’re the IMDB of music and an awesome resource I search often. Please add!
- clement_b 6y agoI love the concept of bang operators, but sadly my usage is limited to: - `!g` if I can't find what I am looking for and am ready for a different angle. - `!` + another letter than g, typed my mistake. This results in an annoying search on the wrong site (e.g., Flickr) or even more random. This must puzzle anyone analyzing search logs on Flickr. Why are users searching for obscure Python error messages?!
- isolli 6y agoI also use !wen, which takes me to (English) Wikipedia. More rarely !wfr (French version).
- zorbash 6y agoI've developed muscle memory for `g! <query>` even on mobile. I started using DuckDuckGo in an attempt to unGoogle my life, but I'm starting to realise that DDG won't do as a google replacement. It displays annoying ads with no clear way to disable them and the quality of search results is significantly worse.
- clement_b 6y agoSame. I have to control myself not to include that !g on every query. Manageable, but makes it too easy to relapse.
- makach 6y agoThat is not what I consider to be one page. It is a useful resource without a doubt, but far from the beloved cheat sheets that could fit one a3 or a4 page.
- jerome-jh 6y agoI wish DDG would restore support for literal, quoted strings.
- bad_user 6y agoOne pet peeve is that I'd like to search Hacker News, however searching with Angolia sucks (via !hn). I get more relevant results if I do a site:news.ycombinator.com filter in Google. Would appreciate a bang for searching on HN that uses Google or Startpage. --- I have my own search keywords in Firefox, if you're using Firefox or Chrome I recommend setting your own search keywords. You have more flexibility in adding stuff that's relevant for you, and it's going to sync on your mobile device too (it's the reason for why I'm using Firefox on iOS). It increases privacy too. Makes no sense to send all of your searches to DDG first. Safari is the only one where you're out of luck, and need DuckDuckGo's bangs.
- qwerty456127 6y ago> Durability is the guarantee that data can be accessed after a failure. It seems like this should be very simple: either your system provides durable data storage, or it does not. However, durability is not a binary yes/no property, and instead should be defined as the kinds of failures you want your data to survive. Since there is usually some performance penalty for durability, many systems provide a way for only "important" writes to be durable, while "normal" writes will eventually be durable, with no specific guarantee about when. I believe we should return to dual-disk systems with separate disk/flash drive dedicated for executable code (OS+apps+swap) and for user data storage. And this can be especially easy now as NVMe drives and micro/SD cards can be so small and low-power. Performance is very important for the drive where you load your executable from and where you put your swap. The speed of this disk actually defines the user experience. At the same time it rarely is a serious problem if it fails - you can just replace it and re-install everything. The user data (like documents, pictures, multimedia files, source codes etc.) storage usually doesn't really need to be that fast to access but it really should be durable as its failure often means loss of some unique valuable data which is a result of work expensive or impossible to repeat in required time.
- colourgarden 6y agoOne small annoyance is that bangs can be set with the exclamation mark _after_ the term, however, only if that bang (with exclamation at the end) was explicitly submitted. For many of my regulars, both exist (!w & w!, !gmaps & gmaps!) but as this isn't standard, it can lead to holes. For example, !hackernews works but hackernews! not. It would be great if all bangs could have both variants as standard rather than allowing submission of one but not the other.
- divbzero 6y agoA DuckDuckGo feature I’d love to see is for multiple bangs to open new browser tabs, e.g. hoverboard !as !gs !target !walmart would open separate tabs of “hoverboard” results from Amazon Smile, Google Shopping, Target.com, and Walmart.com.
- quotha 6y agoSearch all bangs: https://duckduckgo.com/bang?q= https://duckduckgo.com/bang?q=
- palotasb 6y agoThe page doesn't list my favorite operator, !ducky <search term> that will navigate to first result. It's named after the "I'm Feeling Lucky" button that used to exist on Google. It's useful with Firefox keyword bookmarks to navigate to specific pages quickly. Bookmark: Python's PEPs Location: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=!ducky+site%3Awww.python.org%2Fdev%2Fpeps+%22pep+%s%22 Keyword: pep Type in the browser address bar: pep <space> 8 <enter> Will navigate to: https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0008/ https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0008/
- timerol 6y agoThere appear to be a number of dictionaries improperly listed under "Online Services / Tools" instead of "Translation / General". Though I have no idea how to fix that, or even how to report it as an issue
- bmn__ 6y agoWhere are the torrent related bangs? Just silently deleted?